


We collide with place, which is another name for God, and limp away with a permanent injury

by mentosmorii



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Biblical analysis, Gen, M/M, the forbidden fruit: a series of misunderstandings, title is from a Richard Siken poem, translation errors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-17
Updated: 2019-07-17
Packaged: 2020-06-29 23:53:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19841158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mentosmorii/pseuds/mentosmorii
Summary: “There are far more pernicious Biblical misreadings,” he’d confided in Crowley during one of their days off from watching Warlock. “But it’s still just so… silly. One almost feels bad for the poor things.”Crowley would have blinked at him in surprise would that he had the proper sort of eyelids for that type of expression. He’d settled for cocking his head at Aziraphale in a way that implied a certain pastiche of disappointment. The angel had flushed hotly at that.“Well, I know you wouldn’t feel bad for them,” he’d amended, holding up a hand.“I will admit that the art that has come out of my tempting is…” Crowley had struggled, looking for the right word.“Annoying?”Crowley’d snapped his fingers, nodding emphatically. “Annoying!”Aziraphale had almost sagged in relief at the concession. “Thank you for that.”Christmas creeps up on the Dowling household. Starring persisting misconceptions surrounding the Old Testament, unholy just-desserts, and the odd footnotes in religious history that manage to be stranger than fiction.





	We collide with place, which is another name for God, and limp away with a permanent injury

**Author's Note:**

> Opinions on figgy pudding are exclusively my own and do not reflect those of the copyright holders of this work uwu

Canonized catholic saints are, by and large, not a very funny group. 

This isn’t a knock against the lot of them — in the nebulous, ever-mutating cluster of traits that orbit around the platonic ideal of Goodness, funniness hovers, embarrassed, at the edges, never _wholly_ excluded, but still kept at arms lengths out of fear that it might want to be invited to next month’s get-together. If one were to consider what angels themselves are like, this situation makes a great deal of sense. There is a world of difference between being good and being Good, and while the former has room within it for a mélange of ideas, the latter takes a look at the period dramas that run on daytime TV and thinks that they could benefit from a healthy dollop of repression. 

In the hundreds of years in which the Arrangement had plodded along, Aziraphale and Crowley had been able to spend hours going over which Side had a more impressive selection of people from this or that walk of life — Heaven boasted a rather impressive selection of cooks, Hell was rife with celebrity chefs. Hell generally has a monopoly on musicians that fall under the umbrella of classical music with the exception of opera singers, many of whom Heaven has laid claim, with _another_ exception in the case of Dugazon sopranos. Heaven was wall-to-wall with a very _specific_ flavor of writer (genre wasn’t so much the ticket as was a penchant for allegory — not to mention a general miasma of guilt), whereas if you were French in the 20th century and so much as _thought_ a bit too hard about Socrates and that sort of philosophical jazz, Hell generally put you down as a win in their books. 

This sort of debate on which Side has what doesn’t work well with humor, as when Aziraphale had brought the topic up during a luncheon in Spain in the 18th century, Crowley had pointed out that Gabriel had been canonized as a saint — evidence enough in his mind that Heaven didn’t have much of a claim to the idea. 

Had Crowley made a similar insinuation in the early days of the arrangement, they would have surely come to blows. These days, however, it seemed as though the stretch of time in between the spats they had that led to one (or both) of them getting discorporated grew wider and wider, leaving the two of them surprised in the same way that a certain Arizona riverbank side was startled when it woke up one day and found that it had become one of the towering walls of the Grand Canyon when it wasn’t looking. And so it was with Aziraphale and Crowley, who had accidentally become Aziraphale&Crowley when they weren’t paying attention, both of them staring down into the cavernous gorge that’d somehow crept up when they’d stepped onto the same side of the river to bicker. It would have only made things worse to ask whether Crowley had stepped over onto Aziraphale’s side or if Aziraphale had stepped onto Crowley’s side, so they’d both come to an unspoken agreement to not bring the topic up. 

It was such that during their repast in the picturesque medieval village of Pedraza that Aziraphale had hesitated at Crowley’s dig at Gabriel, choosing to almost bashfully sip his Malaga in favor of leaping to the archangel’s defense. Crowley met this reaction with having the grace to not bring up another unfortunate example of saintly funny-business. Thus, the final move in their dance-like impasse in which both of them were pulled slightly away from their respective Manichean extremes towards an odd, nauseatingly human-shaped moral grey-area was completed. 

This incidental effect of the Arrangement was highly amusing to Crowley, and Aziraphale, as he was often wont to do when he ran into the quandary of having courses of actions or habits (of which Crowley fell somewhere in the middle) he was inclined towards run counter to Heaven’s own inclinations, pointedly ignored the business altogether in a rather British fashion. 

(Although it is worth conceding that perhaps it was the other way around — that in the 20th century that Britain would acquire an Aziraphalen affectation as they awkwardly attempted to get the rest of the world to forget the unfortunate colonizing-and-pillaging-for-the-past-few-hundred-of-years matter. That is a discussion for another day, though.)

On this particular day in history, both angel and demon allowed themselves to remain seated comfortably in the messy middle ground that lay smack in the center of their two Sides. After all, it was late-summertime. The punishing aestival heat was just beginning to break, and it would be a pity for either of them to get stuck filling out the paperwork associated with getting discorporated. Autumn was when the Hamlet of Pujerra hosted its Chestnut Festival, and the red wines that would come out of the Rioja and Ribera region around the same time were simply sublime when paired with a chestnut-stuffed capon.

Aziraphale took the final swig of their wine as he watched the bustling crowds around them grind almost to a halt as the locals slowed to admire the way the evening sun set the horizon alight. Crowley snorted at that, waving a hand to refill their wine glasses. 

Aziraphale smiled pleasantly, expressly ignoring another distinctly non-business related development to the Arrangement. 

* * *

Years in the future, Christmas Eve made its way to the Dowling household. Nanny Ashtoreth was in the kitchenette, idly imagining a figgy pudding fit for Warlock’s dessert that night. Nanny had an utterly wicked adroitness regarding imagination, and the dish came out looking like the perfect image of a figgy pudding— which is to say, completely vile in a bafflingly compact sort of way. 

The reason for this dessert is twofold. 

Firstly, if Hell _were_ to have a soft spot, it would undoubtedly be for disquieting, squishy things. That description perfectly fits the images that are brought to mind when one is forced to consider the transgression against the culinary world that is the figgy pudding, and as such, Crowley and Aziraphale reached the conclusion that this dessert would work beautifully as Crowley’s contribution to Warlock’s Christmas. 

The second reason connects to Aziraphale and Crowley’s discussion on Heaven’s lack of humor from all those years ago. 

You see, it is not _just_ that a great chunk of canonized saints aren’t funny. 

Calling someone like Gabriel, to use an example, unfunny isn’t wholly on the mark — it almost suggests the possibility of a funny Gabriel. A prefix like ‘un’ conveys the negation of a word, the not-state of a trait in which the actor must be aware of the opposite state of being. An unfunny Gabriel would have to know what characteristics would befit a funny Gabriel in order to stay in line with being unfunny. A word does not exist yet that captures the true sense of the matter, so in the meantime a placeholder word for people (and angels) like Gabriel must be suggested: afunny. 

The point being, of course, that it is not so much that Gabriel’s nature is the _opposite_ of being funny — rather, he is afunny or ahumorous in the sense that he is devoid of the trait, completely without and having no sense of the quality of which he lacks. Perhaps someone who is _un_ funny could mimic humor by simply acting contrary to their normal state of self, but someone who is _a_ funny could no more do so than you or I could describe the appearance and characteristics of a color we had never seen before. It is simply impossible. And not impossible in the way that a good old fashioned miracle could circumvent, either. 

No, Gabriel was absolutely shit out of luck in this regard. People (or angels) who attempted to fight something so essential to their character often got themselves into more hot water than they would have been had they simply accepted their lot in life. 

Such was the case with Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus, a name which somehow morphed into ‘Jerome’, sans surname. He also responds to Saint Jerome, if one dislikes being overly familiar. Saint Jerome was and is known for many things. 

For example, he was an ascetic hermit, a choice influenced in equal parts by the fact that he believed a life without material vice would provide him with clarity as it was by the fact that he was a man with a strong distaste for other people. 

Further, in a rather bizarre turn of events, there is a brief passage in a biographical work he wrote on Saint Hilarion in which he provides the earliest account of the etiology, symptoms, and cure of a severe vitamin A deficiency. 

(“From his thirty-first to his thirty-fifth year he had for food six ounces of barley bread, and vegetables slightly cooked without oil,” Saint Jerome penned dutifully, scrunching up his nose slightly as he wrote in the fading light of the late-day. “But finding that his eyes were growing dim, and that his whole body was shriveled with an eruption and a sort of stony roughness ( _impetigine et pumicea quadam scabredine_ ) he added oil to his former food, and up to the sixty-third year of his life followed this temperate course, tasting neither fruit nor pulse, nor anything whatsoever besides.”

During the work’s debut in 390 AD Bethlehem, Bishop Epiphanius of Salamis had already attempted to similarly describe Saint Hilarion’s virtues in a letter he’d published — however, only the Jerome biography remains. Correlation need not indicate causation, but _by God_ it would be brilliant if the advice regarding diet pushed Saint Jerome’s work to the head of the pack.)

The final and most notable element to the general sense of strangeness about Saint Jerome is that he is responsible by and large for a rather persistent misconception regarding the scripture. 

As both Crowley and Aziraphale can attest, the forbidden fruit was not an apple. Yet in Saint Jerome’s famous translation of the Old Testament from Hebrew into Latin, a work referred to as the Vulgate, he describes the fruit as, “de ligno autem scientiae boni et mali”. 

_Of the tree of knowledge of good and evil_. 

Alternatively and concurrently, _of the tree of apples_.

To understand what happened here, you must first understand a bit about Latin. 

Saint Jerome was a very smart man. However, he was not a particularly funny man, and this is apparent in the fact that he mistook a pun that functioned more as a reference to the fact that he was very, very well-schooled in Latin as something witty in the same way popular comedy sometimes expects you to laugh because they referenced the fact that Star Wars exists. We shall give Saint Jerome the benefit of the doubt due to some other factors regarding the translation he provided in the Vulgate, but let us affirm that no such concession shall be made for the other folks.

Moving on. 

In Saint Jerome’s translation, ‘mali’ is the word of interest. With the way sentences in Latin are conjugated, mali could refer to mălum, a native Latin noun which means evil (from the adjective malus), _but_ it could also mean mālum, another Latin noun, borrowed from the Greek μῆλον, which means apple. 

(Of course, one must understand that mālum could just generally refer to fleshy, seed-bearing fruit in general. But it generally is understood to mean apple, so we digress.)

It took a single sentence and Milton’s literary darling, Paradise Lost, to cement in the minds of the Christian West the image of a towering apple tree, ripe with rubescent, sumptuous fruits dripping with forbidden knowledge.

Something that not many people know, however, is that Saint Jerome stumbled upon the curious decision to include this _bon mot_ when one of the gardeners at his monastery approached him to ask about his work in the common Latin tongue. The young man had stressed the first syllable of malum incorrectly in such a way that suggested fruit more than it did evil, and Jerome’s eyes had lit up in interest. How delightful that such a simple man could come up with such a clever witticism — the poor fellow stumbled over his words all throughout the conversation, turning his ’s’s into long, winding things. 

Crowley was remarkably proud of this particular temptation and would like it to be known, now and unto eternity, that he finds the apple misconception to be Fucking Hilarious. 

Aziraphale, on the other hand, doesn’t _necessarily_ hate the matter, rather, he finds the whole business to be a bit embarrassing for the humans who ascribe to the theory. 

(“There are far more pernicious Biblical misreadings,” he’d confided in Crowley during one of their days off from watching Warlock. “But it’s still just so… _silly_. One almost feels bad for the poor things.”

Crowley would have blinked at him in surprise would that he had the proper sort of eyelids for that type of expression. He’d settled for cocking his head at Aziraphale in a way that implied a certain pastiche of disappointment. The angel had flushed hotly at that.

“Well, I know _you_ wouldn’t feel bad for them,” he’d amended, holding up a hand. 

“I will admit that the art that has come out of my tempting is…” Crowley had struggled, looking for the right word.

“Annoying?”

Crowley’d snapped his fingers, nodding emphatically. “Annoying!”

Aziraphale had almost sagged in relief at the concession. “Thank you for that.” 

He’d been hoping that Crowley could be swayed to see the impact of the Jerome business — Crowley was perhaps the only being in the universe who could be arsed to care about the apple mix-up, the matter being as it was that he and Aziraphale were the only members of Heaven and Hell who still lingered on the details of the Garden beyond the general ‘the-original-sin-occurred-and-the-good-Lord-did-say-thus-that-that-was-bad-Amen’. )

Thankfully, there are humans who didn’t ascribe to the apple theory. 

Some scholars believe the forbidden fruit was a grape — specifically, a grape made into wine. In the foundational work in the literature of Jewish mystical thought known as Kabbalah, the Zohar asserts that Noah attempted (though he did fail) to right Adam’s sin by using grape wine for holy purposes, and there are other works, such as the Midrash of Bereishit Rabah which make similar claims.

Another theory is the pomegranate. This is largely in part due to the fact that proponents of the theory of the Garden of Eden being in the Middle East point to this fruit’s availability from Iran all the way to the Himalayas since the days of yore. There is also a certain subtext to this theory in which it must be said that the myth in which Persephone gained knowledge and dominion over the otherworld through her consumption of pomegranate seeds was an example of some exquisite imagery.

Wheat is the next most prevalent theory of the forbidden fruit, and the reasoning for this is equal parts botanical and wordplay-based. Wheat may not scream ‘forbidden fruit’ in large, blinking lights, _but_ a wheat berry does technically count as a simple fruit known as a caryopsis — strangely, a caryopsis has the same structure as an apple. In regards to the pun-business, the Hebrew word for wheat, khitah, sounds similar to the word for sin, khet. 

A possible solution to the forbidden fruit puzzle that no one outside of the painter of a 13th-century French fresco and Terence McKenna really buys into is that it was a mushroom. The painter of the 13th-century fresco is, as one would expect, dead. However, McKenna left a collection of his defense of the theory, and it is _also_ what one could expect from the man deemed, “the intellectual voice of rave culture”, and who is also credited as being one of the factors leading to the widespread belief that the Maya calendar was a harbinger of the end times in 2012. McKenna proposed that the forbidden fruit was a reference to psychotropic plants and fungi, specifically psilocybin mushrooms, which he theorized played a central role in the evolution of the human brain. Not many people believe the mushroom theory.

Finally, the fig. The fruit that is the centerpiece of Crowley’s hellish dessert destined for the Antichrist’s Christmas treat. 

In the book of Genesis, Adam and Eve made their own fig leaf clothing, and as Rabbi Nechemia points to in the Talmud, it was from fig leaves that God made garments for Adam and Eve upon expelling them from the Garden. As he remarks: “By that with which they were made low were they rectified.” 

(Aziraphale adores the above quote, and holds it in the same pantheon as Michelangelo Buonarroti’s masterpiece fresco on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, a work that similarly depicts the fig as the forbidden fruit)

Around about six thousand years after Adam and Eve feasted upon the forbidden fruit — or as Aziraphale sometimes called it when he got just a tad too drunk off Riesling, “that Damned Fig” — Crowley, or Nanny Ashtoreth as it went these days, prodded the offensive treat delicately. It glistened with nondescript moisture, ominously. 

There was a rap at the window, which didn’t startle Crowley because he was a demon, and his lot didn’t do that sort of business. Nanny Ashtoreth, on the other hand, started all the same. Crowley figured that that was what a nanny would do — childcare seemed like a profession that would put a person on edge. Ashtoreth put in damn good — or bad, technically — work with Warlock, and she could flinch away all she pleased at strange, unexpected noises. She could flinch into the wee hours of the night if she so desired. Ashtoreth had earned that indulgence, Crowley sniffed, finally glancing at the window to inspect the source of the noise. 

It was Aziraphale, looking frumpy as ever in his gardener form. It was very apparent in how the new form looked that Aziraphale privately was convinced that humans were a bit of a grimy bunch, as the gardener form always had the strange appearance of having been left out in the rain. 

The Brother Francis form knocked again and Crowley waved a hand, allowing the window to slide up.

“My dear,” Aziraphale began, poking his head into the kitchen. “I do believe that humans enjoy that particular treat by setting it alight.”

If it were possible for a dessert to recoil, the figgy pudding surely would have been half off its plate by now.

* * *

Warlock glared at the foodstuff that had foolishly deigned to drape itself over his plate. He was shooting it the sort of gaze that suggested he wanted nothing more than to blink and have the offensive thing gone from his visage, and had his senses been slightly less overwhelmed by the olfactory terror-weapon that is the figgy pudding, he would have noticed his Nanny tense up. 

After a moment though, he deflated, prodding at it dejectedly with his fork. It seemed as though the dessert had won this particular staring contest.

His Nanny exhaled, the motion wracking her body in a way that strangely suggested the action was separate from any respiratory process. 

(When he got old enough to notice similar oddities, Warlock asked Ashtoreth about why she seemed to forget to breathe more often than not.

“Now, Warlock,” she replied cheerily. “That’s a very rude question to ask.”)

“Nanny,” Warlock began, the machinations of his young mind chugging along in a way that can only be described as devious-adjacent. “ _Nanny_ , my friend Charles told me his family is having brownies this Christmas.”

Nanny Ashtoreth looked back at him, her eyes hidden behind her pitch-black glasses.

Warlock tried again. “Nanny, Rebecca’s family gets to have a caramel _yule log_.”

“Warlock.”

The boy perked up, delighted that his ploy had perhaps succeeded.

Ashtoreth put a hand on Warlock’s shoulder, her bony hand emitting no warmth. “Tell me what Brother Francis told you earlier today.”

Warlock furrowed his brow, wracking his memory. When you are only six years old, earlier in the day can seem like an entire lifetime ago. 

“Erm,” he hesitated. “For… the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and springs…”

He paused for a moment, struggling to remember the rest. 

“Flowing…?” Nanny prompted him, and he straightened, recalling the rest.

“Flowing… flowing forth in valleys and hills; a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees—“

“—Fig trees,” Nanny interrupted him, staring directly at him in such a way that made it seem like her gaze could bore a hole through him if Warlock remained under her stare for too long.

“Fig trees,” Warlock echoed enthusiastically, unhelpful.

“Warlock.”

“Nanny?”

“I’ve decided that you are going to have the chocolate that’s in the pantry tonight,” Nanny resolved, swiftly removing the dessert that had been minding its own business in front of Warlock during the exchange. 

Warlock tried to swallow his grin until Nanny left. It didn’t do to look too giddy at pulling a fast one over adults before they turned their backs. The last thing Warlock wanted was to have her put the dish back in front of him — or, heaven forbid, send him to bed without sweets _entirely._

He peered at her as she strode smartly back into the kitchen, handing it off to Brother Francis, who Warlock could have sworn was dismissed for the holidays. Nanny tilted the platter over the trash can, and the pudding slid off pitifully, making a dense _thunk_ as it hit the bottom of the container. The two adults stared down at the dish, silent and unmoving. 

Warlock scrunched up his nose. Adults. Why make something gross if you were just going to be weird about the thing later?

He crossed his arms over the table, letting his head fall to rest in the center of them. On any other night, he would have been in bed about half an hour ago. 

And so it was that on this fateful night, Warlock Dowling waited sleepily in the dining room that connected to the kitchen, contentedly drifting in and out of sleep as his two caretakers cracked open the bottle of cooking sherry.

* * *

In the end, Warlock Dowling did get his chocolates, and although neither Aziraphale nor Crowley have a firm grasp on the memory of Christmas Eve due to the aforementioned delightful sherry from the pantry, both are fairly certain that it was probably a win for both sides. 

Somehow. 

**Author's Note:**

> i think i’ve been on a trajectory to writing fanfiction for good omens ever since my childhood best friend and I decided in the second grade that creating a playground game in which we role-played the fucking stories from Exodus was an ideal usage of our recess. I have no idea why that happened, but happen it did. Side note: everything on Saint Jerome, translation, the McKenna thing, and general biblical info spat out is strangely enough totally factual. Also??? Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael are all canonized saints which I believeeee might be because they are archangels, which are the midranking angels in the Third Sphere of the angelic hierarchy who act heavenly guides, protectors, and messengers. further @the gomens TV i wanted... so badly... for you to expand on the fact that as a principality, Aziraphale is higher up on the heavenly hierarchy than Michael and Gabriel.
> 
> also the knock against 20th century french philosophers is Okay because trust me ive studied sooooo much of that Stuff and those folks were buck wild. 
> 
> uhh cheers and leaving a review/kudos if u dug the fig is super appreciated!


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